Microsoft Word Vucetic plymouth 2020 final
Download 4.8 Kb. Pdf ko'rish
|
Vucetic plymouth
Just Another?! Let us start with the so-called postwar, a.k.a. Bevinite, consensus. 7 Ernest Bevin certainly deserves to have his name immortalized in this way for he ensured that Labour stayed the course on foreign policy. “Russia is Socialist, we are partly Socialist, America may believe in private enterprise. The great task of Great Britain is to weld these forces together to keep the peace,” he declared at the 1946 Labour Party conference, pandering to the party’s left wing (Schneer 1984, 204). The following year at the International Trade Organization negotiations in Geneva, he painted a similar picture for the American diplomats as well. Rather than “just another European country,” Bevin argued, Britain was an imperial power that “could make a contribution to European recovery second only to that of the United States” (Hogan 1987, 46–9). None of this was cheap talk for behind these pronouncements there actually was a plan he called a “Third Force” – an all-but-Churchillian vision of Britain as the leader of a global bloc made up of the Empire and Western Europe, including France and its colonies. 8 The Bevinite consensus had other country referents. A decade after the Attlee-Bevin debate, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan told a US diplomat that “Britain would become another Netherlands” if it failed to confront Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser 9 over the Suez Canal (quoted in McCourt 2014a, 70). Shortly afterwards he gave his first broadcast as prime minister: Every now and again since the war I have heard people say: “Isn’t Britain only a 10 committed European partner on the world stage,” Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the man who served as both foreign secretary and defence secretary in the 1990s, wrote this: “The question for the UK and its Conservative led Government is whether it wishes to retain a global approach, or resign itself to the lesser status. Is it still prepared to act like France, or is it content to have influence comparable with that of Spain?” (Rifkind 2010). The question was once again rhetorical: no party or faction advocated a reduction in foreign policy ambitions to “the level of a Spain” (Christopher Hill, quoted in Gaskarth 2013, 126). In fact, if we are to judge from the interwar musings of figures such as Oswald Mosley, the longevity of “Spain” is second only to “Belgium” (Rubin 2010, 345–7). Scratch any number of imperial-era shifts in Britain’s geostrategic position – 1938, 1922, 1914, even 1873 – and you will no doubt find plenty of evidence of Britain’s leaders obsessing about their country’s greatness. Conversely, review discourses UK prime ministers left behind and you will find but two prime ministers who came close to entertaining the idea of abandoning pretensions to global leadership: Edward Heath, a Tory prime minister from 1970 to 1974 best known for his working-class origins, idiosyncratic views, and declaring a record five states of emergency, and Harry Perkins, the fictional protagonist of A Very British Coup, a 1982 novel by Labour left politician Chris Mullin. 9 The Brexit era follows the same trend. “The feeling that Britain is not just another country and can never be ‘another Switzerland,’” explains a British foreign policy textbook published in 2017, is still a constant (Sanders and Houghton 2017, 7). In 2018, Lord Richards, former chief of defence staff, spoke about a risk of the UK becoming “militarily and strategically insignificant” (Lester 2018) – or, in the words of Conservative backbencher Tony Baldry uttered earlier, a “Belgium with nukes” (McCourt 2014b, 165). (Baldry coined the phrase in 2010 in 11 reaction to the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review, the twin cost-cutting exercise that prompted the reaction from Rifkind quoted above.) At the risk of exaggeration, but with an eye on the rhetoric of the cabinet of the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, I would venture so far as to say that “Belgium” might continue to constitutionalize the British sense of exceptionalism even in a fragmented UK – that is, in a hypothetical future situation in which Scottish independence (and/or Irish unification) radically transforms the polity’s constitutional settlement (and its military power). Select comparisons with France, a fellow European major power likewise bursting with exceptionalism, uncover further foreign policy puzzles. Much like their UK counterparts after the war, authorities in the Élysée and the Quai d’Orsay sought to manage a crumbling empire while pursuing world power – a fact aptly illustrated by the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, for instance. Yet “Western unity” and “Cold War neutrality” meant different things in London and Paris, respectively. A decade after Suez, for example, French president Charles de Gaulle moved to first denounce Bretton Woods and call for a “return to gold” and then detach French forces from NATO’s integrated command. Why was this never an option in London? Simply put, British and French decision makers made different decisions when faced with similar structural pressures, whether in relation to debt, to decolonization, or to the US-Soviet face-off. 10 Britain’s zigzags vis-à-vis “Europe” are part of the same puzzle. As the British world- system all but disintegrated by the 1960s, entry into the Common Market became a new strategic goal – or rather, as most British leaders believed at the time, a new means for pursuing the old goal. This U-turn was never completed. Rather than championing or co-championing European federalism like their counterparts in Paris, UK governments remained committed to a “limited liability” policy, thus reinforcing a membership status that scholars have called “reluctant,” 12 “awkward,” “aloof,” “semi‐detached,” and “on the sidelines” (for overviews, see Daddow 2004; Ellison 2007; and Smith 2017). Moreover, as Christopher Hill (2019, 28, 34–5) observes, UK officials and politicians routinely underestimated the Europeans, based on an erroneous belief that the UK could always either exploit Franco-German tensions or be warmly welcomed as a Download 4.8 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling